missing now,” I tell Edison-Hedison between mouthfuls of orange Jell-O.
Edison-Hedison nods, his own mouth full of cherry.
“In me,” I clarify. “Since I’ve come out of my coma. There is a hole in me, empty and hungry to be filled.”
“Well, I am not a psychologist or a psychiatrist or any of the other psychos. In point of fact, I’ve been told on more than one occasion that I have a terrible bedside manner, that I am not compassionate, that I am distracted, abrupt, and condescending. So keep that in mind as I proceed, and take my advice with a grain of salt— I should also mention that I am also not a social worker, licensed or un—but what you describe is what everyone feels—everyone, all the time—according to my limited and anecdotal research. So take my advice: Forget about it. That hole is unfillable. Get on with your life. Go back to work. Get a hobby. Find a nice, achievable woman and settle down.”
“I already have a girlfriend. African American, I believe. You’d know who she is, I think. I think she’s famous. I believe she was the star of a popular sitcom in the nineties.”
“Oh! What’s her name?”
“I don’t remember. But you’d know who she is. Then maybe you could tell me.”
There is a long and terrible silence.
“I’m scared and confused,” I add.
“Well, as I previously explained, I am not qualified in any of the mental healthish arts. But I can send in a counselor.”
“I feel a slippage; things are not steady.”
“This much I can tell you: Things aren’t. Time keeps on slipping, slipping into the future, a very sensible thing Steve Miller sings in an otherwise nonsensical song. Do eagles fly to the sea? Why would they? I don’t know, I’m not an ornithologist, but I think not. But the slippage part, that’s real.”
“I think they fish there.”
“Ornithologists?”
“Eagles. In the sea,” I say.
“Maybe so. I’m not an ornithologist or, for that matter, an ichthyologist.”
“Nor am I.”
“Then I guess we’re both just bullshitting, n’est-ce pas?”
“It’s not the slipping of time into the future, which I have come to terms with, with which of I am concerned of. It is the slippage of my thoughts, my definitions, my mental landscape that terrifies me.”
“I’ll call the counselor. Unfortunately, you’ll have to make do with our grief counselor. That’s all we have. We have a lot of dying here. It is, after all, a hospital.”
“I’M NOT REALLY grieving,” I tell the grief counselor, a fat man in some sort of vestment.
“Not even lost time?”
“Maybe.”
“Lost memories?”
“Maybe.”
“The movie you say you lost, which I suspect is merely symbolic of lost memories and lost time. I suspect the movie never existed.”
I show him the single remaining frame. He holds it up to the light.
“This is not a movie,” he says. “For it is not moving.”
“It is a single frame.”
“This is a stillie,” he says. “Don’t kid a kidder.”
I massage my temples.
“I find it telling that your ‘lost movie’ and your coma were both three months long,” he says.
“I think it is a coincidence.”
“If there is one thing they teach us at grief counseling camp, it is that there is no such thing as a coincidence.”
“How would they know that? And why would that be part of grief counseling training?”
“Don’t be a baby.”
And with that admonition, I am released into the wild along with a Goodwill brown polyester suit, plastic shoes, a cardboard belt, and a paper bag holding my wallet, my single frame, and my donkey. I am returned to a world both oddly familiar and familiarly odd.
They point me in the direction of the bus station and I walk, passing a mother kneeling in front of her toddler, talking to her quietly and trying, I presume, to calm her. The child, face tear-stained, looks into her mother’s eyes. When I am half a block away, I hear the child scream, “This is not fun!” What is fun? I wonder. What does fun mean to a child? From where does the expectation come that we are to have it? I smoke the cigarette I discover in my hand.
As I wait for the bus, I struggle to cut through the fog in my head. The smoke of the movie fills my memories, but I can no longer recognize it as it curls around the goo and the tricks and silliness already there. I think stupid thoughts. Then I think them again. I am a joke machine set on automatic, generating ridiculousness. If I knew how, I would stanch the flow; I would create a space in which a dignified existence were possible, in which I could breathe. But it does not seem to be possible; I do not exist. I am a distraction. I surreptitiously study the others here, this cast of characters, my fellows at this moment, in this poorly ventilated room, in which the stink of humanity is paramount. There are too many people in the world, most of them, it would seem, in this room, offering up a panoply of body odor and diabetic urine and feces and sick. Stale cigarette smoke hangs on their clothes and mine. I look up to find a man is staring at me. Our eyes meet and he does not look away. It is a challenge, a game of chicken, and I will lose. His eyes are cold and mean and I see myself through them or I imagine I do: an urban weakling, a homosexual, a Jew. His disdain bores into me. I am ashamed of his version of me and ashamed that I care. I glance up again, hoping to discover he has moved on, but he hasn’t. His eyes on me make it even more difficult for me to think. It crosses my mind that perhaps he is mentally ill, that perhaps he is psychotic, that if I don’t keep tabs on him, I might find him, too late, upon me, beating me to death. His anger is that focused. What have I done to make this man hate me so? The answer is nothing. I have done nothing. I have lived my life ethically and still I am broken, ruined by loss and fire, reconstructed by small-town anti-Semites into parody. My one stroke of luck, the discovery of a previously unseen film of monumental historical and artistic significance, maybe by an African American, maybe by a Swede, has been all but ripped from my memory by a heady combination of mental trauma and brain damage. Why is there no sympathy for me? I have never intentionally hurt anyone. I have always gone out of my way to be decent. I am not perfect, to be certain, but there are so many who are much worse, whose days of reckoning never come. Would this man stare at them? I think not. He would see those men as manly, looking out for themselves, taking what they want. The world is not fair. I cannot remember. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. I think that is a thing I read, but I cannot remember. As the station fills with more and more passengers, I can no longer see the staring man. I feel his eyes anyway. It surprises me that there are so many would-be travelers. It is not a holiday as far as I know. I don’t recall all the holidays but I know it’s not Thanks Day, which I am certain comes in the fall sometime and it is very hot today. It is a summer month. The people here are almost all wearing overalls sans shirts. Some are wearing overall shorts, sans shirts. Some are wearing something called shirtveralls. I know they’re called shirtveralls, somehow. How do I know that? Everything is mysterious now.
THE BUS HAS been double-booked. Greyhound offers four dollars off any domestic bus trip for passengers willing to take the following bus, which is at 5:30 P.M. next Thursday or Friday; they’re not certain. No takers, so they implement their “Emergency Lap Plan.” All passengers are weighed and assigned a lap buddy. Since I have lost 47 pounds in the hospital and weigh in at 94 pounds soaking wet